How do you meet their needs?
Given that we have just identified who our ideal customer is, we now need to explore what is important to them. These are your customer’s needs. If it’s important that they can choose from a colour range, then say so. Similarly, is it the final quality, timely delivery, or location of your business then that needs to be shouted about too.
Think about the problems your clients have and how can you solve their problems for them with your service or product. If you can’t fully understand your client’s expectations, then you cannot be sure that you are offering the right product or service.
This is where you can start to develop your USP’s (unique selling points) and what differentiates you from your competition. It is rare that a product or service is totally unique.
If you are a plumber, for example, you will be operating in a market where there are a myriad of similar businesses to choose from – why should anyone pick you over the other provider down the road? Having said that every business can offer something unique and quite often that can simply be you and your expertise or experience and that shouldn’t be overlooked as a starting point.
It may be that your locality is a selling point as buyers won’t want to travel to purchase their goods and that will give you the edge as you can react more quickly and get to a client, if needed, in a timely fashion. Quite often people like a small local provider rather than a faceless national provider and your reputation locally will be key in this arena. Recommendations, referrals, testimonials from satisfied customers can give you the edge over other suppliers.
As part of this exercise it is worth creating your core message. If you could get your five ideal clients in the room what would be the key promises and pledges, you would make to them based on your offering? This is a really useful thing to do as it will clearly identify your messaging for your business and you can refer to it every time you talk to a customer, create any advertising material even when writing a costing estimate for a client. Make sure some elements identify your differences versus the competition we would all like to think we are ‘the best’ or ‘the expert in’ but are we really? What you might be is ‘local’ or ‘have a longstanding team all fully certified’ or offer ‘no long-term contracts’ all things that might inspire confidence in a client.
Which leads us onto Step 6.